[Koha-translate] [Koha-devel] Translation annoyances

[Katrin Fischer]

Hi,

I know that things are not perfect for translating Koha, but we have
already fixed a lot of issues since I started translating it a few years
ago and we keep improving. It's not easy and it can only be done by
people dedicating time and work.

I have added some notes and comments to the points you raised:

> 1) String concatenation is BAD.
> For example, this line of code:
>    var disabledForCurrent = _("Disabled for") + ' ' + $branch;
> turns into this translatable string:
>    msgid "Disabled for"

There is a bug for that:
Bug 7327 - Translation script doesn't like concatenated javascript strings
http://bugs.koha-community.org/bugzilla3/show_bug.cgi?id=7327


> For some languages this is very hard to translate without sounding stupid or just plain wrong. jQuery has some string placeholder support for javascript, so Koha really should be using those instead!
> The example above would turn into:
> 
>    var disabledForCurrent = _("Disabled for {0}");
>    msgid "Disabled for {0}"

I think this method looks good and I have seen something similar being
used in the newer code for translating the datatable toolbars:

#. For the first occurrence,
#. SCRIPT
#: intranet-tmpl/prog/en/includes/datatables-strings.inc:1
#: intranet-tmpl/prog/en/includes/datatables.inc:2
msgid "(filtered from _MAX_ total entries)"

So this looks like something we could do, but fixing all existing
strings will take a lot of work and testing.


> 2) Consistency would be good.
>    msgid "EAN:"
>    msgid "EAN: "
>    msgid "EAN :"

We already fixed a gazillion of those small inconsistencies when we
cleaned up the templates after agreeing on some capitalization rules.
Some things like this still remain, also often we will have a term with
and without :. For an additional space like this a patch would be really
easy.


> 3) Sentences should not be cut in pieces.
>    msgid "Please"
>    msgid "upload"
>    msgid "one."
> The "upload"-text is a link in the sentence. Ideally this should be:
>    msgid "Please %supload%s one."

Agreed. Also, sentences should not be 'constructed' with
if-else-constructs where it can be avoided.

I think this problem here especially shows when there is a link in the
string, because the scripts look for html tags. It might be possible to
improve that.


> 4) Is it a verb or a noun?
>    msgid "Copy"

I am not sure how to improve that - do you have a suggestion? Often it
helps to look at the list of files a string appears in to make a bit
more sense of it. In Pootle you can see the list when you hover over the
'Comment:' bit on the left.


> 5) The wiki-like help texts should be in separate po-file. The help texts inflate the staff UI po-file immensely, and the help translation is not quite as critical as the UI. Having all the help texts interspersed between all the actually important strings is irritating.

I've sent it to the koha-translate list earlier, but repeating it for
koha-devel - there are some bugs related to this:

Bug 7934 - Separate po file for help pages
http://bugs.koha-community.org/bugzilla3/show_bug.cgi?id=7934

Bug 7939 - Separate po files for different MARC dialects
http://bugs.koha-community.org/bugzilla3/show_bug.cgi?id=7939


> 6) Translation is not programming. Replace all Template Toolkit code with placeholders.
> For example
>    msgid "Cancel [% IF TransferWhenCancelAllWaitingHolds %]and Transfer [% END %]All"
> and
>    msgid "Cancel hold and return to : [% overloo.branchname %]"

Are you suggesting to replace the %s with the real variable names? This
could be a bit easier to read. We got comments in Pootle showing you
what %s stands for what, but I admit that with a lot of %s in a string
it gets a bit hard.


> 7) Exclude URLs. Those are not content that should be translatable.

In some cases I have wanted to change URLs in translation. For example I
am linking to the German Firefox Plugin page for the offline-circulation
plugin on the circulation home page:

#: intranet-tmpl/prog/en/modules/help/offline_circ/list.tt:5
#, c-format
msgid "https://addons.mozilla.org/en/firefox/addon/koct/"
msgstr "https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/koct/"


Hope it helps,

Katrin